


Teleology

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Series: Some Lost ficlets [10]
Category: Lost
Genre: AUish, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Post-Finale, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:50:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>We always end up back here, don't we?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teleology

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted to livejournal, 2007.)

**teleology** , _noun_  
(philosophy) a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purposes  
  
  
  
They came down from the mountain without any answers. Jack had been the one expecting them, but as his feet sank into sand again, he knew he hadn't really believed a rescue possible, not in his gut, not after all the things he'd seen and done.  
  
And Sawyer was there, anyway, mouth a hard line and eyes almost black with some brutal emotion that couldn't have been anger, even as much as it seemed to boil up from inside him, like something seething beneath his skin. He was stoic now, which was the only way you knew he was neither happy nor angry—he stopped talking. It wasn't disappointment, either. It didn't have a goddamned thing to do with the radio tower; that was clear. Sawyer never expected answers. Yet he had been there waiting when Jack returned, milling aimless with the ones that never ascended the mountain, left scattered like crumbs over the shoreline.  
  
Sawyer always walked with a stomp, and Jack found it oddly comforting. His own awkward way of relating to people, of understanding them, was thankfully glossed over with the easy waltz of his steps. But Sawyer's unreal smoothness never looked like smoothness to someone who watched his feet dig into the sand, his back arched against aches that must've come from that deep down place he kept it, the fire and the cold. Scooped out and ready, sturdy as a large iron kettle. Sometimes Jack thought he might want to peer inside; sometimes he thought he might want to touch him. But it seemed too possible to make him lose his step. One-two-three, one-two-three. Breathe-two-three, breathe-try-fail, breathe-God-help.  
  
He wondered as he walked out toward the sea and the blankly gray horizon if anyone else noticed that the steps were all he had most days, ballast against the truth of him: ineffectiveness like a plague.  
  
So Jack came down; so Sawyer was there. Sawyer stayed still for once, warm tan skin, sweep of gold hair, powerful muscles crouched and holding, everything smooth—until he opened his eyes. Jack was the one moving, and he was walking toward him with limbs draped over with exhaustion. Where Jack went, Sawyer's eyes followed, alarming blue and lost, despite the effort.  
  
"Hey," Jack said softly.  
  
It occurred to him again, when he heard his own voice, that he had just killed a man, several. Their being alive after all wasn't the point.  
  
When he sat down, Sawyer's eyes finally shifted away. "Charlie's dead," Sawyer mumbled. "Somebody might oughtta say a few words."  
  
"I know. I will."  
  
"Didn't say you. Somebody."  
  
Jack shut his eyes tight, sick at his stomach. "It wasn't my fault."  
  
"Didn't say that either."  
  
"He knew what he was doing." Jack didn't believe it.  
  
Sawyer's hair hung in his face, but he swept it back, palm scraping noisy stubble. Sawyer was just plain loud sometimes; you couldn't ignore even the most mundane things he did. Or at least Jack couldn't.  
  
Jack said, "Well, with Locke… Hey, did _you_ want to do it?"  
  
"What the hell would I say?" he snapped. "Fuck."  
  
"I don't know."  
  
Jack took a deep breath, to gather the bullshit enough that he could hold it together, but Sawyer laughed bitterly, suddenly.  
  
He said, "We always end up back here, don't we?"  
  
"We?"  
  
"This island. It's gonna kill every last one of us. But I just know," he turned his head and shot a glare at Jack, "I know when it's all over, it'll be just you and me sitting here staring at each other on this beach, somehow flat out unable to get this island to put us out of our fucking misery."  
  
Sawyer hung his head and Jack pulled his knees up to his chest, trying to watch the sea and not Sawyer's frame, hunched and tight, somehow collapsed and contracted all at once. A wad of crinkled paper, held tight in a fist.  
  
Sawyer's limbs unfolded suddenly, then, defying Jack metaphor because they didn't crinkle like paper; they didn't even crackle with Sawyer's fire. It was just a swish of sand, barely heard above the breeze, but it still sounded to Jack like movement. Sawyer was about to stand up, lumber away from him.  
  
Jack smiled bitterly. "Doesn't have to be the beach. We could always move back to the caves."  
  
Sawyer's gaze softened for a moment, and he let out a wheezing laugh before he quieted again.  
  
Jack said, "You should think about it. Charlie. You were here longer than me. When I was…still there. And I sent him down there."  
  
"You didn't any more send him down there than God or the Island or the Wizard of Oz sent us here." Sawyer rubbed at the bone of his ankle, concentrating on it and not Jack. "Why are you here, Doc?"  
  
"Here?"  
  
"With me."  
  
"Well," he replied with a smile, unwilling to say the serious things he knew, not that he would've framed them properly anyway. "I sure as hell didn't do it to get us into any philosophical discussions."  
  
"Not much point," Sawyer replied with a sardonic smile, and then the quiet was allowed to roll in.  
  
Jack could physically feel the tension in Sawyer now, now that he'd unfolded himself and opened his mouth to speak. It made his eyes calmer, though. The more he opened them, the more he shoved everything all back and down, stuffed himself full of it, whatever it was. Always vigilant for a gap, a crack, that might show just how much was inside him.  
  
Jack thought not of armor and chinks, though, but of something far messier, true but absurdly drawn from the association of words. The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow, then, who needed a brain but whose worst problem seemed to be keeping all the stuffing in. The sand was the color of straw, but bleached, and Jack began to sift it in his fingers. Breathe-two-three, gone-two-three, sea-two-three, sky-two-three.  
  
Breathe-two-three, noth-ing-here, Char-lie-gone. It should've hurt, but it didn't, quite, anymore. All the failure was right out there staring at them every day, so it was no longer a shock. It was no longer like any of it meant anything.  
  
Jack watched the birds in a swirl over the lazy tide. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two three, one-two three.  
  
Stop.  
  
All was a war of silence inside him, but his brain, puckish as it always was in exhaustion, insisted on shuffling back to The Wizard of Oz. The tin man must've had a heart all along for the way he craved it, he thought suddenly. All he actually needed was the sign of it, really.  
  
His lips curved into a smile as he let somber thoughts drift off, replaced with Sunday nights year by year, him curled up on the couch watching the movie, singing along, wondering about why the wicked witch was so wicked or why anyone would want to leave Oz to go back to a land of tornadoes. The somberness let itself be pushed out of reach, but it lingered, tethered.  
  
He turned his head to say it to Sawyer, to see if he had his own rituals about the movie, to see if he would offer up Kate as Dorothy, to see if there was that much trust stretching between them. But Sawyer's head was bowed—his whole body, in fact—although Jack could see still his eyes, hard and gone.  
  
He reached out to lay a hand on Sawyer's back, but Sawyer reacted like a startled bird for a split second before his shoulders tensed and he knocked Jack's hand away with a dull slap.  
  
Only when Jack had returned to his own personal space did Sawyer say, softly, "Don't."  
  
Jack sat there quietly for a moment, then he said, "No."  
  
"Dammit…"  
  
Jack held up his hand and curled his fingers into a fist, stalling, examining his fingernails and the dirt and blood caked there. Then he reached out and let his fist settle against Sawyer's neck, uncurling his fingers slowly, letting them crawl.  
  
Sawyer let him, and his neck was warm and damp and so tight, radiating something up Jack's arm and settling it into that place in his chest from which he breathed, normally.  
  
They weren't dead, Jack thought. Maybe the end had finally come.


End file.
